The first in a series of stories on the MVPs from the nine Super Bowls played in New Orleans. Super Bowl 2013, Feb. 3 at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, will be the city's record-tying 10th time hosting.

Sports at all levels are rife with clichés come to life. Stories of redemption. Relying on the powerful chip on the shoulder. Overcoming odds when it looked like a career was over before it ever got started.

Pro football players are no exception, even when it comes to performing on the game’s biggest stage. Case in point is former Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson.

Forty-three years ago, Dawson was at the heart of the first experience New Orleans ever had with the NFL’s crown jewel, Super Bowl IV, for both good and bad reasons.

Now 77 and still living in Kansas City where he’s been in the TV sports business and also on the Chiefs' radio team, Dawson is quick to deflect praise for his role that January day in 1970.

The Chiefs thumped the Minnesota Vikings, 23-7, behind a defense chock full of eventual Hall of Famers and kicker Jan Stenerud’s powerful right leg. When the game ended, though, it was Dawson who was voted the MVP.

That was the pinnacle of a career that began with Dawson languishing for five years in Pittsburgh and Cleveland as an unknown backup but eventually landed him in the Hall of Fame in Canton, 18 miles from his hometown in Alliance, Ohio.

It was also a game and a week when the face of the Chiefs for 14 years had to grapple with off-the-field distractions that would be served up as red meat in today’s media climate.

When he recently reflected on that week and that once-in-a-lifetime Sunday, Dawson didn’t mask his pride in what the Chiefs did to underscore what the New York Jets had started the year before to bring the AFL closer to equal footing to the NFL.

“Since we played in the first (Super Bowl) and got our butts kicked, it was important to us to get back,” Dawson said. “We were there because we had a job to finish.”

Before the Chiefs could finish, though, it’s important to flash back to the start of that 1969 season.

After appearing in Super Bowl I and losing to Green Bay 35-10, Kansas City muddled through a non-playoff season in 1967 and then lost to bitter rival Oakland 41-6 in the 1968 playoffs.

But with high hopes because of that star-studded defense, the Chiefs went into 1969 expecting to contend for the AFL Championship. Two games into the season, Dawson crumpled to the field against the Patriots in Boston, his knee twisted like it shouldn’t be.

The initial prognosis called for surgery. Dawson was in Oklahoma City on an operating table – “I had done the thing where you count back from 100 and don’t even get to 95,” he said with a chuckle – when Chiefs Coach Hank Stram found a different opinion when he called a doctor with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Dawson woke up in a recovery room and was told the procedure had been scrubbed. Instead, he was ordered to use crutches at all times for a month to let the knee heal on its own.

“I was devastated when I heard the word ‘surgery’ because back then it meant your season was over,” Dawson said. “Then when I was told I could come back, it changed my mood.”

As well as the Chiefs’ season.

Third-string QB Mike Livingston came in after backup Jackie Lee was also hurt and guided Kansas City to a 4-1 mark in Dawson’s absence. Once the veteran signal-caller got back, the Chiefs went toe-to-toe with Oakland down the stretch and lost the regular-season finale to the Raiders 10-6, meaning KC was the wild card.

Unfazed and with Dawson rounding into health, the Chiefs went to New York and beat Joe Namath and the Jets 13-6 on a fourth-quarter Dawson touchdown pass to earn a rematch with the Raiders. After falling behind 7-0, Kansas City’s defense seized command and led the way to a 17-7 triumph and a return to the Super Bowl.

“I didn’t have to do much because of the defense, which was extraordinary” Dawson said and then offered his favorite part of the day the Chiefs spoiled the Raiders’ hopes of getting their second Super Bowl opportunity. “The Raider players had packed their suitcases and brought them to the stadium with them. They were all ready to go to the airport on the way to New Orleans. They had to carry their luggage to their cars and had to bring it right past our buses.”

Instead it was the Chiefs who flew to the Crescent City that Monday and it wasn’t long before controversy kicked in.

On Tuesday as the teams started preparing for their meeting at Tulane Stadium, NBC broke a story of NFL players’ involvement with a well-known Michigan gambler, Donald Dawson (no relation), who had been arrested on New Year’s Day and who was known to facilitate betting on NFL games.

The gambler’s address book included a number for Len Dawson, along with Namath and other lesser known players. Len Dawson said he knew the gambler in passing, and had spoken to him twice that season – once after his knee injury and again when his father died.

“They really tried to barbecue me over that gambling thing,” Dawson said. “I had to go through that, which affected me and my family. There was nothing to it.”

As the Chiefs’ brass spent the day scrambling to figure out how to handle the story, Len Dawson made one request.

“They asked me how we should present it and I told them ‘Present it the way it is: That it isn’t true,’ ” Dawson said.

At a late-night press conference, described in an Associate Press story as “tension-filled,” Dawson and Stram stood side-by-side with Commissioner Pete Rozelle and refuted the NBC story.

The attention didn’t go away quietly, though, and got severe enough that Stram moved his quarterback to a room under an anonymous name in the team hotel.

The worst part, Dawson, said were his concerns for his team. In a 1987 interview with a reporter from Chicago Tribune, Dawson said he prayed and asked God to “shine a light on his teammates.”

“My teammates were great guys, so they were concerned about me, but they didn’t believe any of that stuff,” Dawson said.

Dawson’s road roommate that season was LSU graduate Johnny Robinson, an All-Pro safety for the Chiefs. The two had forged a strong friendship through the years to the point where Robinson said he could read Dawson as well as anybody else.

“I think it was very strenuous on Lenny, but no one with our team paid any attention to it,” Robinson said. “We gathered around him. He was a great leader for us and he showed that by handling it as well as he could.”

In the 1987 interview right before his Hall of Fame induction, Dawson said the “gambling thing didn’t give (him) any extra incentive.

“How could it?” he said. “This was a big game. You don’t need any outside motivation.”

Twenty-six years later, though, he conceded that winning the Super Bowl in the days after the allegations created another layer to the lifetime memory.

“I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I’m a pretty strong person,” he said. “That was the biggest game of my life and for me and my teammates and we accomplished something big.”

To do that – to beat a Vikings team favored by 12½-13 points beforehand – the Chiefs had to come up with a game plan built around suffocating defense, an offense that moved the ball well enough to give Stenerud chances to put points on the board and minimal mistakes.

That put Dawson in the spotlight and delivered.

His numbers weren’t necessarily eye-catching that day: 12-of-17 passing for 142 yards with a touchdown and an interception. But he engineered a KC offense that moved the ball up the field enough for Stenerud to connect on three first-half field goals, the first kick from a then Super Bowl record 48 yards.

Dawson deflected credit for his role, saying the Chiefs’ defense and strong-legged kicker were the bigger stars. He even defined the game-sealing play as “lucky” before proudly dissecting a 46-yard touchdown pass to Otis Taylor.

“The big play in the game was a hitch play to Otis Taylor than he turned into a 46-yard touchdown,” Dawson said. “We snapped the ball on a quick count and we caught them in the safety blitz, so it’s man-to-man on the outside with no help."

That put Minnesota cornerback Earsell Mackbee on Taylor, also an eventual Hall of Famer.

“Earsell missed a tackle and it was all over,” Dawson said. “That was the only time in the game they blitzed all those people. It was first down and with the quick count, they couldn’t camouflage the blitz as well as they wanted to. I somehow got the ball off and Otis made the catch and turned it into a touchdown.”

The Dawson-to-Taylor lightning bolt turned a 16-7 battle into a 23-7 breather, considering the way the Chiefs’ defense was playing. Desperate to come back Minnesota quarterbacks Joe Kapp – regarded as far superior to Dawson before the game – and Gary Cuozzo threw three interceptions on the final three series.

When the final seconds ticked off, the Chiefs were champions with the AFL’s second stunning upset in a row.

“That was huge for us,” Dawson said. “We were the ‘not-ready-for prime time guys from the AFL, and we made it two in a row.”

And Dawson delivered the crowning moment of his 19-year career.

He played with the a chip on his shoulder that was a blend of AFL pride, damaged ego from the Super Bowl I loss and the sting of the media frenzy over a story that faded away in the weeks after the game in New Orleans and never surfaced again.

“I think it was the biggest moment of Lenny’s career because of all the stuff he’d been through,” Robinson said. “It was big because of the importance of the game to our team and our league. It was important to Lenny because he was the quarterback in Super Bowl I. And it was big because of all he had to deal with that season and that week.”

And in the city that knows how to celebrate, Dawson and his teammates didn’t let that chance pass by.

He called the postgame locker room one of the fondest memories of his life.

“Somebody came up and said ‘The President wants talk to you,’ ” he said. “I said ‘The president of what?’ Then they told me it was President Nixon, so I got to talk to him for a while.

“Once we got done celebrating in the locker room, we went out on the town. I don’t know that anybody got any sleep that night. It was a happy crowd.”

Led by a quarterback who had endured plenty of unhappiness, injury and accusations before the game ever kicked off.